Chess master says intelligent design featured large in his initial literature search

Mapou:

King, if the Vatican believes in Darwinian evolution, then they are serving two masters.

Thank you for excommunicating the Vatican. As I recall, they are the [lady of ill repute] of Babylon. Daniel King

Jerry@51: So? Daniel King

"Yawn. Sarcasm. How original." Yawn. Sarcasm. How unoriginal Henry Crun

As far as I know the Catholic Church does not support any specific mechanism of evolution. jerry

Proper little Miss Marple, aren’t we? But I’m afraid that the comments I have made are comments that anyone, regardless of their religion or otherwise, would make if they thought evolution the most likely explanation for the origin of species.

Yawn. Sarcasm. How original. And while you think differently, your comments are typical of the type atheists make. Barb

But I’m afraid that the comments I have made are comments that anyone, regardless of their religion or otherwise, would make if they thought evolution the most likely explanation for the origin of species.

One has to define what one means by evolution. This remark shows a complete misunderstanding of the debate. The debate is mainly over the origin of new alleles and so far no science can explain this. There is also the issue of the origin of new body plans and control mechanisms. If you want to sound reasonable one has to understand these things and know what science knows about it. Otherwise, it will result in nonsense and ad honimens as we are seeing.

you and I know this, as do many religious people. However, the type of religious people attracted to ID find evolution incompatible with their beliefs.

Nonsense. I personally have no problem with naturalistic evolution but science does not support it. As far as I can see it is mathematically impossible. It requires tens of thousands of miracles. jerry

King, if the Vatican believes in Darwinian evolution, then they are serving two masters. There is no doubt that there was an evolution over billions of years but it was not Darwinian. It was a design evolution. And no, the changing beaks of finches do not constitute Darwinian evolution. It's just genetically programmed adaptation. Mapou

Mapou:

So you can’t be a Christian and believe in evolution, pure and simple. It’s like serving two masters

Tell that to the Vatican. Daniel King

“But I’m afraid that the comments I have made are comments that anyone, regardless of their religion or otherwise, would make if they thought evolution the most likely explanation for the origin of species.” Henry, you and I know this, as do many religious people. However, the type of religious people attracted to ID find evolution incompatible with their beliefs.

This is a bold faced lie, of course. And if it's just a ploy to water down the religions of the world, it's weak and stupid. Christian writings, including the Bible, clearly teach that the species were designed and created by God via knowledge and wisdom. So you can't be a Christian and believe in evolution, pure and simple. It's like serving two masters. What is wrong with y'all? This nonsense makes you look stupid. Mapou

"But I’m afraid that the comments I have made are comments that anyone, regardless of their religion or otherwise, would make if they thought evolution the most likely explanation for the origin of species." Henry, you and I know this, as do many religious people. However, the type of religious people attracted to ID find evolution incompatible with their beliefs. Acartia_bogart

Proper little Miss Marple, aren't we? But I'm afraid that the comments I have made are comments that anyone, regardless of their religion or otherwise, would make if they thought evolution the most likely explanation for the origin of species. Henry Crun

What in these posts makes you think I’m an atheist? The lowercase "g" in god, for one thing. And the fact that every single thing you've stated has already been stated here (or on other sites I frequent) by other atheists. Barb

Shucks! I messed up the quotes but you can figure it out. Mapou

Crun:

Mapou, Again I have to disagree with you: design doesn’t always work like that. If you had said “development” I would have agreed, but the best designs are often those that are completely different and groundbreaking.

Not true. The best designs are those that inherit the best features from their ancestors. Why do you think modern software design is hierarchical? New stuff are build on top of old stuff. It's called bottom-up design. Why? Because it's the intelligent thing to do. But suppose you are right (I don’t think so, but just suppose): what does your hypothesis about the way the designer did it, tell you about the nature of the designer? It tells me that the designers are just like us, only much more advanced. I am not one of those fundamentalist Christians who believe that God is omnipotent and omniscient. In fact, my God, Yahweh, is an entire united and vast civilization of many, many Gods (elohim). And they do make mistakes. And yes, we humans, too, are designer elohim. Mapou

There are none so blind as those who will not see.

I have been saying essentially the same thing about those who believe in Darwinian processes for years. Transitions/new life forms present two problems for naturalistic evolution. There are too few of the life forms. Second, there is no mechanism to explain the appearance of new life forms. The is no coherent theory of evolution. Until that is admitted we will get such nonsense as the above comment represents. jerry

Pass... Axel

What in these posts makes you think I'm an atheist? Henry Crun

If you're completely convinced that ID is a "bankrupt" viewpoint and that we're all blinded by ideology, why don't you take your atheist views elsewhere? Barb

Whatever, Barb. Henry Crun

Henry Crun @ 34:

Yes, you’re right, and I know it deep down. There are none so blind as those who will not see. I think that even if god descended, grabbed them all the atheists in the world by the shoulders, shook them and said “why won’t you use the brains I evolved designed for you?”, they would still deny it.

Fixed it for you. Barb

Acartia_bogart, Yes, you're right, and I know it deep down. There are none so blind as those who will not see. I think that even if god descended, grabbed them by the shoulders, shook them and said "why won't you use the brains I evolved for you?", they would still deny it. Not that Allah ever WOULD come down and do that..... Henry Crun

Henry, you are wasting your time here. Even if Tiktaalik was proven to be a transitional species between lungfish and tetrapods, the ID people would just argue that there are now two gaps instead of one. Even if we had fossil evidence from every generation of every lineage, from the first self-replicating molecule to the highest form of life (the sloth), these people would not be satisfied because their theory is based on religion, not science and evidence. Acartia_bogart

*sigh* All right, Joe. Did Shubin et al. find THE transition between fish and tetrapods? No. Did he find a late living relative of the creature that WAS the transition? Very likely. Was this an important find that indicated what the transition creature looked like, as expected? Yes. Was it found using evolution theory, even if it is a relative of the actual transition creature? Yes Has ID been used to find such fossils? Not even remotely. Will it ever be used? No as it's unusable for prediction - or anything else Henry Crun

Piotr- the fossils can't tell us anything unless we have the genetic evidence to support the transitions. And until someone takes fish embryos, applies targeted mutatgenesis and continues to do so until a fishapod develops, the fossil record is nothing more than "I wouldn't have seen it if I didn't already believe it". Joe

Joe, people make reasonable educated guesses based on the information available at the time. The margin of error may be wide if the information is incomplete. New data may well force you to revise your expectations. We have two sister groups: Tetrapodomorpha (tetrapods and their closest relatives) and Dipnomorpha (lungfish and their closest relatives). The earliest known dipnomorph fossils are from the very beginning of the Devonian (the Lochkovian age, some 416 My ago). Tetrapodomorphs must be equally old even if we have no fossils from that time yet. The two groups may have separated already in the Silurian. The real upper bound on the possible age of Tetrapoda (which are a subgroup of Tetrapodomorpha) is the tetrapodomorph/dipnomorph split. They must be younger, but how much younger is anyone guess until more fossils are found. If Tetrapoda are older than previously thought, so be it. Even 400 Mya is compatible with the datable nodes in the family tree. If we find new bones, we'll know more. Piotr

Tiktaalik-First, the set-up:

"In a nutshell, the 'fish–tetrapod transition' usually refers to the origin, from their fishy ancestors, of creatures with four legs bearing digits (fingers and toes), and with joints that permit the animals to walk on land. This event took place between about 385 and 360 million years ago toward the end of the period of time known as the Devonian. The Devonian is often referred to as the 'Age of Fishes,' as fish form the bulk of the vertebrate fossil record for this time."- Jennifer Clack, The Fish–Tetrapod Transition: New Fossils and Interpretations; "Evolution: Education and Outreach", 2009, Volume 2, Number 2, Pages 213-223

Got that- "the transition" refers to an event, a specific event that occurred between two specified time periods, a time when there were fish and no tetrapods and the time when there were fish and tetrapods. With that now firmly established we return to "Your Inner Fish" chapter 1 where Shubin discusses what he was looking for- hint: evidence for the transition, ie the event:

Let's return to our problem of how to find relatives of the first fish to walk on land. In our grouping scheme, these creatures are somewhere between the "Everythings" and the "Everythings with limbs". Map this to what we know of the rocks, and there is strong geological evidence that the period from 380 million to 365 million years ago is the critical time. The younger rocks in that range, those about 360 million years old, include diverse kinds of fossilized animals that we would recognize as amphibians or reptiles. My colleague Jenny Clark at Cambridge University and others have uncovered amphibians from rocks in Greenland that are about 365 million years old. With their necks, their ears, and their four legs, they do not look like fish. But in rocks that are about 385 million years old, we find whole fish that look like, well, fish. They have fins. conical heads, and scales; and they have no necks. Given this, it is probably no great surprise that we should focus on rocks about 375 million years old to find evidence of the transition between fish and land-living animals.- Neil Subin pages 9-10 (bold and italics added)

OK he did it just exactly as described, bracketed the dates. However his dates were wrong, which means he did not find evidence for the transition, which occurred many millions of years earlier. In order to find what he was looking for, evidence of the transition, he needed to focus on rocks 400 million years old, as the new data puts terapods in existence about 395 million years ago. Tetrapod trackways from the early Middle Devonian period of Poland Why can't evolutionists understand that? Joe

Henry:

Why would a designer bother with transitionals?

They are not transitionals. They are separate living organisms. BTW there aren't any known fishapods between the time of fish and the time of tetrapods. That should be a problem for evolutionism, yet it isn't. Joe

Piotr:

Nobody (at least nobody who knows what she/he is talking about) claims Tiktaalik is the direct ancestor of the Tetrapoda.

True. So what? Shubin said he was looking for evidence for the transition. And he said to do that he had to look between the times that fish lived and tetrapods appeared. Had he the new data of the tetrapod track in Poland he wouldn't have been looking where he did. Joe

Humbled@24, Completely wrong yet again, but in that at least you are consistent. Go to Museum, see the way in which fossils of skeletons correlates with the ages of the rocks in which they are found. The transitioning is obvious. Henry Crun

Mapou, Again I have to disagree with you: design doesn't always work like that. If you had said "development" I would have agreed, but the best designs are often those that are completely different and groundbreaking. But suppose you are right (I don't think so, but just suppose): what does your hypothesis about the way the designer did it, tell you about the nature of the designer? Henry Crun

Transitional fossils exist only in the fertile minds of the Darwin faithful. By ignoring the data, forcing, and in some cases manually reshape the puzzle pieces, evolutionists create imaginary links connecting species etc when in reality no transitional link exists. There is no concrete evidence, imagination, faith and wishful thinking dont count, that a species has ever become another species ala macro evolution. What we do have are the remains of certain creatures that lived and died leaving a story, no not the mythical fairy tales darwinists tell their children, for us to uncover. humbled

Chess is for kids. Adults playing it just raises the memory competence of moves and other moves. its hogwash to see board games as anything related to intellectual pursuits. the big thing is about this is the great flaw of not segregating the memory from the thinking being. Computers can play chess because no thinking is involved. they really don't think. tHey just have search engines searching for memorized moves to deal with moves. Video games are no less difficult. just fewer adults play them. this is case in point for modern errors about the human intellect relative to animals and machines. Its strange to see this flaw continue. Robert Byers

One more thing, Crun, to take up the example you gave earlier, it is much more likely that the designers initially wanted to create fishapods and got the idea to design tetrapods afterwards. One thing begets the other. This is the way design works and it is the way it has always worked. Mapou

Crun, from what we know about intelligent design, designs evolve over time. Their complexity also increases over time. We see this trend in all the artificial products we, human designers, have designed and built over the years. Deny at your own detriment. Mapou

Mapou, I have to disagree with you. Why would a designer bother with transitionals? Surely an intelligent designer wanting to make tetrapods would just make the tetrapods. Why bother with the fishapods? Henry Crun

Intermediate fossils are not evidence against intelligent design. In fact, from what we know about design over time, it would be be extremely unlikely if no such fossils existed. Mapou

I'm afraid its you that's missing the point. The Tiktaalik find is well documented and it's open to anyone else to go in the footsteps of the Chicago researchers and find their own fossils. And since you put any evidence that supports evolution down to fraud and deceit, clearly you are only concerned with protecting your own bankrupt viewpoint. Science is beyond your capabilities. I think there is little point in taking this further. Henry Crun

"Hardly a failed prediction since they found the fossil they predicted!" I think you're missing the point mate. Finding a fossil, inventing an imaginary scenario for it, getting an artist to misrepresent what Tiktaalik actually looked like and forcing it to fit the mythical tree of life sounds a siren loud and clear. It shows to what lengths the darwin-faithful will go as well as the highly imaginative and pure speculation based nature of this pseudo-scientific religiously motivated theory. "What do you think they did, wandered the Canadian Arctic on a whim?Accidentally stubbed thief toe on it whilst mincing around in the cold?" Too be honest, and factoring in past and present history, failed predictions, peer review fraud the list goes on, Darwinists have ZERO credibility. It seems to me that, for them, anything goes, lying for Darwin... "Come on, Humbled – let’s see the ID fossil collection." Come now Henry Crun, you are attempting to deflect. We are talking about the religion of Darwinian Evolution, stay focused please. humbled

Nobody (at least nobody who knows what she/he is talking about) claims Tiktaalik is the direct ancestor of the Tetrapoda. It is one of a number of Devonian sarcopterygians closely related to tetrapods and classified together with them in Tetrapodomorpha; it gives us some idea of what the actual ancestor may have looked like -- and that's about it. The Middle Devonian trackways from Poland are not accompanied by any skeletal remains, so it's hard to tell if they were left by "true" tetrapods, or to what extent the animals that left them were terrestrial (feet with digits appeared before their owners ventured ashore). We can only hope that their bones will be found sooner or later. Tetrapodomorps and lungfish must have separated by the Early Devonian anyway, since we have stem lungfishes (Diabolepis, Youngolepis) more than 400 My old. Piotr

Humbled @ 12, Hardly a failed prediction since they found the fossil they predicted! What do you think they did, wandered the Canadian Arctic on a whim?Accidentally stubbed thief toe on it whilst mincing around in the cold? Come on, Humbled - let's see the ID fossil collection. Henry Crun

Indeed. But more likely is: Fish species N >>>>Fishapod species 1, 2.....W....X.....Z where the Fishapod species will have a lot of inherited characteristics from N but naturally selected modifications do there will be slight differences from each other. Then, Fishapod W>>>>>tetrapods Fishapod X>>>>>line eventually dies out but Tiktaalik is a fossil of X. And that also shows why Tiktaalik can be younger than some tetrapods: it's line doesn't die out until after tetrapods evolve. It is a closely related cousin of the ancestor of tetrapods rather than a direct ancestor. And yes, it may involve geographical separation of species. Henry Crun

Humbled @ 12

Tiktaalik cannot be a transitional form between fish and tetrapods if tetrapods existed prior to Tiktaalik!

Why not? It could go: Location1: Fish >>> Fishapod1 >>> Tetrapod1 Location2: Fish >>>>>>>much later>>>>>>> Tiktaalik >>> Tetrapod2 Couldn't it? CLAVDIVS

Henry Crun, Tiktaalik isn't helping your case mate. Tiktaalik cannot be a transitional form between fish and tetrapods if tetrapods existed prior to Tiktaalik! Like so many other supposed transitional forms touted in scientific circles and the press (think Archaeopteryx and Ida), Tiktaalik is a dead end. Tiktaalik is yet another failed evolutionary prediction. If this were any other theory, one not protected by the darwin faithful, it would have been discarded ages ago. humbled

Tiktaalik was found out of place. The fossil record now shows fish-> tetrapods-> fishapods. That isn't how the sequence should be. BTW ID is not anti-evolution. Even baraminology accepts descent with modification. IOW if the public knew tat Darwin argued against a strawman, and that strawman still lives today, they would have a better understanding of what is really being debated. People can accept evolution without accepting evolutionism and Common Descent. Joe

Humbled, the fact that evolution theory was used to find Tiktaalik fossils is strong supporting evidence for the theory. Let's see you do that using ID. Henry Crun

"...the evidence for evolution is overwheling", Henry Crun, darwinian religious convictions, faith, indoctrination, job security, financial incentives etc one side, I fail to see how any intelligent and widely read man would agree with this statement. Also, many of us are still waiting, some more than others, for this so called "overwhelming evidence" we keep hearing about. Some of us have even taken courses in an attempt to find such evidence only to be left under whelmed and even more convinced it's all codswallop. humbled

News @ 2, That's pure paranoia. The most likely explanation is that this is an intelligent and widely read man who understands the evidence for evolution is overwhelming. Henry Crun

Checkmate! Henry Crun

Robert, I am just guessing here. But, you were never good at chess, were you? Acartia_bogart

Chess is just a game. Its not a intellectual study. i know some try to say chess is a high intellectual game but in fact all it does is use our memory. every move is part of a memorized plan based on previous moves and games. Chess is no more intellectually demanding then riding ones bike. if smarter people get involved in chess then it just raises the amount of memorization that is needed. in fact this is why i remember back in the ,80,s and since every now and then some dumb kid becomes a chess PRODIGY. They are in fact just showing a kids concentration of memory to things most kids don't care about. cjess is not anything more then a card game. In fact computers play chess. Yet don't have a clue or thought about it. Its just memory and this shows a flaw in peoples thinking about human thinking. Robert Byers

In this letter, Ken Regan seems to be describing his personal beliefs as that of a fideist. As far as I can tell, he accepts Darwinian evolution as the best explanation of events within a universe designed by God.

(3 Jan 2008) I've narrowed it a little further than the standard definition of "fideist". My gamut of "grounds for credence", with Truth at the top as the goal, runs: Proof [which Godel showed falls short of Truth even in simple math] K1: Reproducible Knowledge (i.e., "hard science") K2: Experiential Knowledge (interfaces with K1 via the "Problem of Induction") K3: Modeling (interfaces with K1 via Occam's Razor) Faith Intuition Emotion (Gardner and the Bible.org items treat this too) The standard definitions of fideism seem to deny all possible knowledge of God, but I think K2 and K3 are possible---indeed I think I've had a taste of them. So I reject only "Proof" and "K1"---if I could redefine the term, I'd define a fideist as "someone who does not rely on God as a scientific hypothesis." Practical ramifications: I never promise someone he/she will "experience God today", I avert things on the slope toward "snake-handling", I reject Dawkins' and Victor Stenger's framework, and when Alister McGrath (in /The Dawkins Delusion/) criticizes the Intelligent Design /enterprise/ /for/ "trying to prove the existence of God" I'm right there with him, despite my being a Christian in the same math field as William Dembski who agrees with ID at the level of cosmology. My "MORE RESTRICTED DEFINITION" of "fideism" may even be compatible with Catholic teaching, 1998's Fides-et-Ratio and all; indeed it may be "just another rediscovery of Orthodoxy" a-la Chesterton. Hence I tried making up words "anapodeixist" or "adeixist" with Greek roots meaning "non-proof", "non-empirical-demo", but the former got a nose-wrinkle from my wife while the latter sounds too much like "atheist" :-).

rhampton7

Of related note: At the 11:50 minute mark of this following video 21 year old world Chess champion Magnus Carlsen explains that he does not know how he knows his next move of Chess instantaneously, that ‘it just comes natural’ to him to know the answer instantaneously. Mozart of Chess: Magnus Carlsen – video http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7399370n&tag=contentMain;contentAux A chess prodigy explains how his mind works – video Excerpt: What’s the secret to Magnus’ magic? Once an opponent makes a move, Magnus instantaneously knows his own next move. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504803_162-57380913-10391709/a-chess-prodigy-explains-how-his-mind-works/?tag=segementExtraScroller;housing This ability to 'instantaneously' know answers to complex problems has long been a very intriguing characteristic of some autistic savants; Is Integer Arithmetic Fundamental to Mental Processing?: The mind's secret arithmetic Excerpt: Because normal children struggle to learn multiplication and division, it is surprising that some savants perform integer arithmetic calculations mentally at "lightning" speeds (Treffert 1989, Myers 1903, Hill 1978, Smith 1983, Sacks 1985, Hermelin and O'Connor 1990, Welling 1994, Sullivan 1992). They do so unconsciously, without any apparent training, typically without being able to report on their methods, and often at an age when the normal child is struggling with elementary arithmetic concepts (O'Connor 1989). Examples include multiplying, factoring, dividing and identifying primes of six (and more) digits in a matter of seconds as well as specifying the number of objects (more than one hundred) at a glance. For example, one savant (Hill 1978) could give the cube root of a six figure number in 5 seconds and he could double 8,388,628 twenty four times to obtain 140,737,488,355,328 in several seconds. Joseph (Sullivan 1992), the inspiration for the film "Rain Man" about an autistic savant, could spontaneously answer "what number times what number gives 1234567890" by stating "9 times 137,174,210". Sacks (1985) observed autistic twins who could exchange prime numbers in excess of eight figures, possibly even 20 figures, and who could "see" the number of many objects at a glance. When a box of 111 matches fell to the floor the twins cried out 111 and 37, 37, 37. http://www.centreforthemind.com/publications/integerarithmetic.cfm Gifted people being able to instantaneously know answers to complex problems is also something that argues forcefully against the notion that our minds are merely the 'emergent' products of molecules in motion; Electrical genius Nicola Tesla was born in Serbia in 1856,,, his father was a clergyman. Excerpt: While walking in Budapest Park, Hungary, Nikola Tesla had seen a vision of a functioning alternating current (AC) electric induction motor. This was one of the most revolutionary inventions in the entire history of the world. http://www.reformation.org/nikola-tesla.html The boy in this following video rivals, or surpasses, Nikola Tesla as an example of innovative ideas coming fully formed to the mind without any need for trial and error: Bluejay: The Mind of a Child Prodigy – video http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7186319n The following video gives deep insight into how serious the problem of 'knowledge acquisition' is to the worldview of atheistic materialism: Kurt Godel - Incompleteness Theorem and Human Intuition - video (notes in description of video) https://vimeo.com/92387854 It is interesting to note that although Alan Turing believed humans were merely machines, much like the computers he had envisioned, failed to realize that his idea for computers came to him suddenly, 'in a vision', thus confirming Godel's contention that humans had access to the 'divine spark of intuition'. A divine spark which enables humans to transcend the limits he, and Turing, had found in his incompleteness theorem for computers, mathematics, and even for all material reality generally (S. Jaki). also of note: Do the New Atheists Own the Market on Reason? – On the terms of the New Atheists, the very concept of rationality becomes nonsensical – By R. Scott Smith, May 03, 2012 Excerpt: If atheistic evolution by NS were true, we’d be in a beginningless series of interpretations, without any knowledge. Yet, we do know many things. So, naturalism & atheistic evolution by NS are false — non-physical essences exist. But, what’s their best explanation? Being non-physical, it can’t be evolution by NS. Plus, we use our experiences, form concepts and beliefs, and even modify or reject them. Yet, if we’re just physical beings, how could we interact with and use these non-physical things? Perhaps we have non-physical souls too. In all, it seems likely the best explanation for these non-physical things is that there exists a Creator after all. http://www.patheos.com/Evangelical/Atheists-Own-the-Market-on-Reason-Scott-Smith-05-04-2012?offset=1&max=1 bornagain77

Yes, but so? Is he saying that the theory of evolution "featured large in his initial literature search" or is he just sucking up to Darwin's trolls? Yes, scary world out there. News

In the same paragraph:

As a serious Christian he sometimes gets asked if he believes in the theory of evolution, which he does.

Reciprocating Bill